Kahoot’s free trial gives teachers a window to test paid features before spending anything. But getting the trial set up correctly — and knowing how students exploit games once you’re live — matters as much as the subscription itself. Here’s what to know before you start. How the Kahoot Free Trial Works Kahoot runs a 7-day free trial on select plans. To access it, a “Start free trial” button must appear on the pricing page when you’re signed in. If that button isn’t visib...

Technically it was yesterday, but it’s still the 31st of March in some timezones, so I’ll slide this post in on a technicality! To all my beautiful trans friends: I see you, and I’m proud. You’re the current punching bag of dullards desperate for distractions, and yet you persevere and remain true to yourselves. You are the kindest people I’ve ever met. Thank you for being a part of my life. By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2026-04-01. Technically it was yesterday, but it’s still ...

I’ve seen /ai pages popping up here and there on other people’s blogs . The idea for these pages is, and I quote, «promote trust and transparency». Trust, in the context of 2026 internet—and society in general—is quite the complex topic. Dishing out trust willy-nilly is no longer a reasonable thing to do, and I also think we’re getting to the point where the “benefit of the doubt” is no longer worth considering. If I were to write on this /ai page that I don’t let these ...

"Intellectuals and Society" by Thomas Sowell - a collection of essays in which Sowell criticizes "intellectuals", by which he mostly means left-leaning thinkers and opinions. Interesting, though certainly very biased. This book is from 2009 and focuses mostly on early and mid 20th century; yes, history certainly rhymes. "The Hacker and the State: Cyber Attacks and the New Normal of Geopolitics" by Ben Buchanan - a pretty good overview of some of the the major cyber-attacks done by states in th...

“It is no bad thing to celebrate a simple life.” ― The Lord of the Rings Now that I've explored the north island of New Zealand, it was time to head over to what many describe as "the better island". Initially, I had planned to stay in Christchurch for two nights, take a bus to Twizel, and borrow a small camper van from a friend. As these things go, the car engine broke a week before my arrival. Even though the peak season was coming to an end, the accommodation and rental car situat...

Trip Venturella released Mr. Chatterbox , a language model trained entirely on out-of-copyright text from the British Library. Here's how he describes it in the model card : Mr. Chatterbox is a language model trained entirely from scratch on a corpus of over 28,000 Victorian-era British texts published between 1837 and 1899, drawn from a dataset made available by the British Library . The model has absolutely no training inputs from after 1899 — the vocabulary and ideas are formed exclu...

Consider the following problem. You have a large set of strings, maybe millions. You need to map these strings to 8-byte integers ( uint64 ). These integers are given to you. If you are working in Go, the standard solution is to create a map. The construction is trivial, something like the following loop. m := make ( map [ string ] uint64 , N ) for i , k := range keys { m [ k ] = values [ i ] } One downside is that the map may use over 50 bytes per ent...

My Olympus OM-20, fitted with a stack of 7mm, 14mm, and 25mm extension rings. I’ve been curious about macrophotography for a while, and recently I got hold of some extension rings for my OM-20 to give it a try. I took them out with me on one of the first properly sunny days of the year, and snapped these photos I’m quite pleased with. Both were shot handheld, using the 7mm and 25mm extension rings for a combined 32mm extension. 📷 Olympus OM-20, Zuiko 50mm f /1.8 + 32mm extension ...

This post is my contribution to the April 2026 IndieWeb Carnival on the topic of “ Adventure ”. Thank you for hosting, Pablo! The Seven Hills of Edinburgh challenge invites participants to hike up seven designated hills in Edinburgh within a day. There are official events to participate in the challenge, but a few years ago I decided to try a version of it myself, walking up as many of the seven hills as I could within a day and taking my own path. I love walking but this challenge was a l...

AI coding assistants respond to whoever is prompting, and the quality of what they produce depends on how well the prompter articulates team standards. Rahul Garg proposes treating the instructions that govern AI interactions (generation, refactoring, security, review) as infrastructure: versioned, reviewed, and shared artifacts that encode tacit team knowledge into executable instructions, making quality consistent regardless of who is at the keyboard. m...

“Our test facilities can’t reach the combination of heat flux, pressure, shear stresses, etc., that an actual reentering spacecraft does. We’re always having to wait for the flight test to get the final certification that our system is good to go.”—Jeremy VanderKam, deputy manager for Orion’s heat shield, speaking in 2022 On Wednesday, NASA will attempt to send four astronauts around the moon on a mission called Artemis II. This will be second flight of NASA’s SLS rocket, and th...

As with other such posts on my blog, this is not sponsored in any way, I just write about the things I personally use and think are worth sharing. In the process of rewriting my blog I changed how I host my videos. I currently have two posts with embedded short videos: How to make a timelapse with a Raspberry Pi I started using ESPhome and now I have a local smarthome Previously I stored the video files in the CDN's storage (first Cloudfront, then Bunny CDN, here is the blog post ab...

Every time I have ever explained the Boyer-Moore majority element algorithm to someone, people have reliably found it very charming. So now I'm going to explain it to you. The problem is this: we have an array of elements which we are told possesses a majority element . That is, an element which occurs more than half the time. We would like to figure out what that element is. There's couple obvious solutions, like, build a map of all the counts, then iterate over that map at the end and fin...

OSLO – (March 30, 2026) – The Royal Netherlands Navy (RNLN) has declared Shield AI’s V-BAT unmanned aircraft system (UAS) operational following testing aboard the HNLMS Johan de Witt, which was operating off the coast of northern Norway. V-BAT supports the RNLN efforts to increase maritime domain awareness using unmanned systems, with 12 V-BATs being acquired by the RNLN. Eight RNLN vessels will be equipped with the equipment necessary to support V-BAT operations. “With operations rang...

Posted to Indienews I'm hosting the IndieWeb Book Club for next month. I've picked the first fiction book so far: Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency by Douglas Adams. Wikipedia | OpenLibrary What do a dead cat, a computer whiz-kid, an electric monk who believes the world is pink, quantum mechanics, a chronologist more than 200 years old, Samual Taylor Coleridge (poet), and pizza have in common? Apparently, not much… until Dirk Gently, self-styled private investigator, s...

A couple of years ago I posted a list of student projects I’d be interested in supervising. Here’s what’s happened since: Project Status Altruism in Software Teams undone Browsercast partially Validity of Claims in progress The Impact of Calibrated Code Review undone Code Selectors undone Simulations of Distributed Systems done Developer Discussions undone Dragnet undone Drawing Execution Order undone ...

Happy April 1st! This post is part of April Cools Club : an April 1st effort to publish genuine essays on unexpected topics. Please enjoy this true story, and rest assured that the tech content will be back soon! One Friday night a few months ago, my family and I sat down to relax and enjoy a TV show on our streaming platform of choice. The subscription was a perk of one of our credit cards, and we had been satisfied customers for several months. This time was different. Instead of a "Conti...

I blogged about Pope Leo XIV  here . Pope Leo XIV has an undergraduate degree in mathematics. He saw my post and asked for my help with his latest encyclical.  LEO: Let's have lunch together at Popeyes. BILL: Why Popeyes? LEO: The name is Pope-yes so I get a discount. BILL: Your treat. [We met at Pope-yes and had the following discussion.] LEO: I am working on an encyclical to resolve the tension between miracles in the Bible and modern science.  BILL: What's the issue? LEO: The Bible has mir...

Switch, map of functions, and interface registry for dispatching in Go. Switch, map of functions, and interface registry for dispatching in Go.

April Fools Day is somewhat of a legendary day among nerds. Historically it's been when the nerds at GMail introduced GMail Custom Time , where you could interrupt causality by making GMail look like you sent a message before it was actually sent. It actually worked. Sometimes this gets taken too far and the joke falls flat, causing a lot more problems than would exist if the joke never happened in the first place. Incidents like this have resulted in many companies just putting in po...

TL;DR; After migrating three production Python web apps from MongoEngine to the Raw+DC database pattern, I measured nearly 2x the requests per second, 18% less memory, and gained native async support. Raw+DC delivered real-world performance gains, not just synthetic benchmarks. About a month ago, I wrote about a new design pattern I’m seeing gain traction in the software space: Raw+DC: The ORM pattern of 2026 . This article generated a lot of interest and a lot of debate. The short versi...

Before we begin, I’m glad to note that my Indian Space Progress reports completed three years last month, and have crossed 10,000 globally spread readers. Thank you very much for reading and supporting the only such overarching coverage of India’s space activities over and above my flagship Moon Monday writing. 🚀 The LVM3 rocket behind the clouds during the launch of Chandrayaan 3. Image: Dheeraj Khandelwal This article is part 3 of my ongoing series on India’s launch vehicle cr...

Back in November I pre-ordered an Ollee Watch , which was delivered in February. After playing with the watch, I decided I didn't want it, so I posted it up on eBay - never worn, so brand new. A week or so later it sold and I posted it off to its new owner. A day or 2 later, the buyer messaged me saying the backlight wasn't working. This immediately raised my suspicions as the watch was brand new and I had packaged it up well. Anyway, I gave them the benefit of the doubt after they had se...